Recalibrating equilibrium, one passage at a time, until charity surfaces.

05/20/2012

Diamonds and Rain

(Editor's note: The branch at left is the same river birch, leafless in winter)

Last year, a thunderstorm rattled the river birch that straddles our side yard and the neighbor's, snapping a jagged branch off the birch and impaling the green patio umbrella we'd bought five years earlier when installing our courtyard off the kitchen.

C'est la vie, we thought. The umbrella had been a good buy but it's pool-table green cloth had faded badly to a slightly verdant shade of gray. The storm had given us an excuse to invest in a better umbrella that more closely matched the freshly painted red trim on our white Acadian cottage.

Joy found a brilliant red umbrella, larger than its predecessor, and a nice splash of color in the courtyard to complement the house. We admired it each day when pulling up to the house after work. The crimson umbrella set off the lighter green river birch and the deeper, waxy green ligustrum behind it in striking ways: a good purchase, an economic good with aesthetic appeal, but hardly the stuff of life lessons.

Or so we thought. Some weeks later, after an especially exhausting day at work, I found myself whiling away some evening time with idle games on the computer, when I heard my wife first groan, then follow with a chilling utterance, "Shoot fire!"

To understand the import of that expression, you must first know that ours is a household that's virtually curse-free, free at least of the conventional, contemporary vulgar curses of the four-letter variety. But whether one curses freely or not, there comes a time when everyone needs to get out an oath at a moment of upsetting truth or physical pain. (For my grandmother, it was the quaint expression, "Dear Gussie!"). In my wife's family, "shoot" passed for a fairly serious oath, but "shoot fire!" occasioned a truly serious moment of bad news.

Hence, I pushed back my computer chair with great trepidation and looked through the door into the bathroom. Joy had lost a diamond necklace, given to her by her mother, who had received it as a cherished gift from her recently deceased husband, and the object of all that sentiment now lay somewhere down the bathroom sink drain and perhaps in irretrievable chaos in the city's storm sewer.

Or maybe not. Sensing my weariness, Joy began to cover the vanity so we wouldn't use it until finding time to explore things further the following day. I, in turn, sensed her frustration and knew there was no time like the present to plumb the depths of this dilemma. After breaking down the gooseneck plumbing below the sink, I reached into the open pipe and pulled out, to my surprise, the slinky, sterling chain with the diamond pendant attached and untroubled by its bath in the water trap.

There are few discoveries so sweet as those made when the heart has sunk, when the soul senses the errand may be fruitless, and the mind reasons that hope will not be requited. A short time later, another thunderstorm washed our Louisiana lawn, and my heart gushed forth with gratitude, not merely for the rediscovered diamond in the plumbing, not merely for the rain dripping from the river birch, not only for the water puddling on the pink-and-gray patio bricks. But there, atop that crimson umbrella, came streams of diamonds cascading down the canvas in ephemeral beauty: bright, silvery, luminous beads of water in a brilliance unlike anything I'd ever seen.

The mind told me this, that the marvels of modern chemistry can create water-repellant coatings to capture and bead water in these spectacular patterns. But the heart told me another thing: When my life, fast approaching middle age, appeared to be heading toward no special destination, God brought me Joy, and her beauty radiates through each day in ways I could never have imagined.